


All the Safe Places

by ughasif



Category: Avengers: Endgame - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Endgame Fix-It, Fix-It, Fluff, Gen, Insomnia, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 13:46:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19063903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ughasif/pseuds/ughasif
Summary: Peter’s back and for the most part, he’s doing fine. It’s just that all the safe places in the world have narrowed down to one (it’s embarrassing and inconvenient and moves around from time to time but there it is): wherever Tony Stark is.Or,Peter keeps falling asleep around Tony and Tony knows he’s better company than that.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS IMPORTANT. 
> 
> In this story, Nat and Tony are both alive, Tony albeit with a missing arm. Cap is in the present. Bruce and the Hulk are still separate entities but at peace with each other, allowing Bruce to change to and fro whenever he likes. Clint is retired and Thor off with the Guardians but they continue to visit and help out occasionally. To sum up: the OG Avengers are, for the most part, whole.

~~Peter has a problem.~~

Peter has many problems, but he can live with all of them except one. 

“My spidey-sense is going off, like  _all_ the time now,” he confides to Ned. They’re sitting in the bleachers during a football game that MJ dragged them to (she likes yelling bored insults at all the players in turn and flipping the opposing team off when the teachers aren’t looking). A cat is drowsing in the sun on an empty seat nearby. It’s half-time and they’re sitting far away from the players, so it’s almost quiet. Peaceful, even.

And anxiety is coursing down Peter’s spine like water from a dripping tap, barely there but constant enough to drive him crazy. 

“Dude,” Ned says. “That’s not good.” 

“You think?” Peter squashes down the urge to turn around and scan the area for threats. He knows by now that there will be nothing there. “It won’t even let me sleep. I keep waking up thinking someone’s about to attack me.” 

“You should tell Mr Stark.” 

“I can’t do that. He’s got enough to worry about, man, he just saved the entire universe. He lost his arm, and he almost—“ Something sticks in Peter’s throat before he gets out “—died.” 

Ned shakes his head. “I still can’t believe you know the guy who _saved the entire universe.”_

Peter wishes he could be as happy about that as Ned is. The conversation is kicking his spidey-sense up a notch, so he changes the subject. At the back of his mind hangs the image of Tony, white and bleeding on a battlefield, too weak to even focus on Peter for long. No, he can’t tell Tony about this. 

 

 

Morgan climbs into Peter’s lap and asks him to play superheroes. She has a makeshift cape fastened around her shoulders and a smile as charming as her father’s turned on Peter.

Peter is really.. really tired. He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in days. Years, technically. He doesn’t want to play superheroes. 

Tony is watching them with soft eyes, so Peter plays superheroes. 

He is halfway through the game before he realises that his spidey-sense has calmed down completely. His relief is enormous, and he puts aside his exhaustion and roars like the Hulk (self-consciously, because Tony’s eyebrows are high and his mouth is twitching) for Morgan’s benefit. 

When Pepper takes Morgan away for a bath, Peter slides onto the couch next to Tony, who is typing something on a sleek tablet.

“Mr Stark,” he says. 

“Hmm?” 

“My..” He catches sight of the prosthetic arm, and swallows. “Can I sleep here for a bit?” 

Tony looks him over curiously, then says, “Yeah, go ahead.” 

Peter curls into a ball on the cushions and falls asleep immediately. He notices when his eyes are already sliding shut that his feet have ended up in Tony’s lap. Tony is looking down at them, bemused. 

Later, Peter will be embarrassed. 

 

 

Peter forms a hypothesis when he gets home and tests it over the course of the next few days. Unfortunately, it’s proven correct.

“ _Only_ around Mr Stark?” May asks, a little hurt, when he gives her a toned-down account of what’s going on. 

“Yep.” He feels his face heat up a bit. “What am I gonna do?” 

He knows that most places in the world are safe. Or at least like, half of them. He knows.. but on some level, he doesn’t. On some level, he is afraid all the time except when he is with Tony. He wonders, aloud, if it’s because he’s Iron-Man or because he’s Tony Stark or because he’s Mr Stark. May gets the question. 

She leans across the table and presses a kiss to the top of his head. She smells like flowery fabric softener and pepperoni, owing to the pizza they just inhaled. It’s homey. May is the safest he’s ever gonna get, he reminds himself sternly. 

“It must be anxiety. PTSD, maybe. You might wanna go to a therapist.” It’s a suggestion but Peter knows it might become more than that soon. 

“I’ll think about it,” he tells her. “You have pizza sauce on your nose.” 

They put on some old records—May and Ben’s wedding album is a favorite—and Peter helps her do the dishes. ~~At the back of his mind hangs the image of Tony, white and bleeding~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~He tries to figure out what he’s going to do about this problem as he works.

 

 

After two hours of insomnia later that night, he sneaks out as Spiderman and goes to Tony’s. He falls asleep in a chair on the porch. Morgan finds him drooling at 6:00 AM and he swears her to secrecy in exchange for his attendance at a tea-party. 

“Princess tea-party?” 

“Princess-CEO,” she says, holding up a tiara in one hand and a briefcase inscribed with Pepper’s initials in the other. 

Peter wouldn’t miss it for the world.


	2. Chapter 2

They’re eating surprisingly good Thai food from a cheap diner Peter insisted on taking Tony to, and no-one has batted an eyelash in Tony’s direction yet. It’s kind of refreshing.

“Mr Stark,” Peter says around a mouthful of pad thai, “no offence but your disguise sucks.”

Tony surveys Peter over the rim of his sunglasses. “What are you talking about? No-one’s recognised me yet. Cap was right, a baseball cap and sunglasses will fool anyone.”

Peter snorts. “That girl in the back’s been taking pictures of us for the last 20 minutes. And this was the first time a waiter here has ever called me ‘sir.’” He says it with barely concealed awe.

“Huh.” Tony winks at the girl in the back, and she sways on her feet. “I must’ve tuned it out.”

Since the war, this has become almost normal. Tony’s a dad now, and the aloof mentor thing was getting kind of old anyway. And it helps that the kid died in his arms. That’ll do a lot for forcing suppressed emotions to the surface.

There’s a strain though.

“Bill, please,” Peter says, and when it comes, it’s with a complimentary plate of mango sticky rice and a card that says, ‘Thank you for everything you do for us,’ and a smiley face scribbled on to it. The manager, the cook and all the waiters have signed it.

Tony takes off his cap with a defeated sigh, flashes a smile in the direction of the watching crowd gathered by the kitchen and drops a hefty tip. Peter digs into the rice.

Yeah, the strain. They don’t talk about Titan or the (second) snap, Peter dying and Tony almost dying. Peter carefully avoids looking at Tony’s prosthetic arm if Tony is watching. They don’t talk about emotional subjects at all. They just go their own ways and their paths intersect far more than they used to.

Peter is funny and awkward and hero-worshipping. The exact opposite of Harley. And Tony doesn’t always know how to talk to him. But all that matters is that he’s here in front of Tony, whole and talking nineteen to the dozen as they get up— and wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with Iron-Man’s face on it. Tony laughed when Peter opened the door to him wearing that, and the kid flushed and went to change but May thought it was cute and Tony agrees with her, although that didn’t stop him from being smug about it the entire way to the diner.

On the car ride home, Peter falls asleep almost immediately. His head lodges onto Tony’s shoulder and Tony lets it, not knowing quite what to make of it. Happy grins at him in the rearview mirror.

At the time, Tony doesn’t think anything of it. 

 

 

He enters his workshop on a Saturday evening to find Peter with his face smushed on the table, a wrench lying on the floor beside him. DUM-E hums anxiously nearby.

Tony ruffles his hair more gently than he needs to, then nudges him awake. After a few tries, the kid peels his eyes open, focuses them on Tony with concerning difficulty and says, “Mr Stark, you ever see that really old movie Ghostbusters?”

“Sure, kid.”

The next words come out quieter than usual. “Can we watch it?”

Tony realises his hand is still caught in Peter’s curls. He removes it, pretending not to notice the hint of disappointment in Peter’s eyes, and says, “Sure,” again.

“But first,” he says, catching Peter around the middle as he tries to move past Tony. “You’re going to explain to me why you look like you just walked straight out of The Walking Dead.”

Tony positions himself so that Peter is essentially trapped between him and the table. Peter leans back, his tone a little too nonchalant and dark circles a little too deep as he says, “I thought movie references were my thing.”

“Please, kid. I was calling Thor Point Break while you were in diapers.” It’s a stretch but Peter doesn’t know that. “And that one was too easy anyway.”

There’s a pause in which Tony watches Peter’s hands shake slightly.

“It’s just—school—workload—just regular high school stuff, Mr Stark.”

Tony knows that’s not it and he wants to push but the stutter that he hasn’t heard since he first met Peter is back and they should be way past that. He doesn’t like making Peter nervous. It reminds him too much of the way he used to feel when Howard confronted him about anything. Not that Tony ever stuttered—he always glided his way suavely through. Slippery as an eel, his old man used to say.

He drops it. Peter falls asleep eight minutes into the movie, and Tony tosses a blanket on top of him. Iron-Man socks that Tony is sure he wasn’t supposed to see peek out from under it.

Peter ends up staying the night. In the morning, he sits on the island in Tony’s kitchen, feet swinging as he eats cereal and asks Morgan who her favorite superhero is, pointing meaningfully to himself as he does.

“Auntie Nat,” Morgan informs him from her perch next to him, looking up at him with adoring eyes in spite of her betrayal.

“No way.”

Standing by the stairs, Tony watches Peter try to convince her Spiderman and Iron-Man are way cooler than Black Widow, knowing for a fact that Peter couldn’t form a complete sentence for ten minutes the first time he met Natasha. His face is relaxed, his hair rumpled with sleep. The dark circles have faded.

Tony decides to let it go completely.

 

 

They’re in the middle of a battle when Peter flutters silently to the ground.

Tony’s heart climbs into his throat. “Hulk, you got this?” He asks perfunctorily, already on his way to Peter.

“HULK ANGRY!” The Hulk roars. He leaps to a rooftop and grabs the floating Basilisk by his leg. The creature trains his optic beams on the Hulk’s fist, to which he releases a booming groan of pain. While the green monsters grapple, Tony lands next to Peter.

“Kid, you all right?” He wishes he didn’t have to ask that question so often. Peter’s chest is rising and falling evenly, but he remains completely motionless otherwise. Tony kneels next to him, rolls him over and takes off his mask to reveal a slightly bruised face.

“FRIDAY, scan,” Tony orders, shaking Peter rather roughly. He doesn’t understand what could have gone wrong. The kid was barely doing anything, just evacuating civilians as per Tony’s request. The Basilisk hasn’t even come within ten feet of him. Tony was anticipating complaints of boredom and a barrage of pleas to be allowed to do more just seconds ago.

“Mild bruising all over, boss. But with Peter’s enhanced—“

“Yeah, that should be no problem,” Tony interrupts, impatient. The Hulk is busy beating the Basilisk against a rooftop, to the cheers of a few stray onlookers, but it won’t last long. “What else?”

“No other injuries or illnesses to report, boss.”

“That’s not—“

“He appears to be asleep.” FRIDAY sounds a tad amused. Even fond.

Tony stares at the underside of his helmet. “What? Why? How?”

FRIDAY suggests connecting to Karen and asking her if she can explain what’s going on. Karen informs FRIDAY that she suspects severe sleep deprivation, since Peter has been out in the suit almost all night every night for the past two weeks. She estimates 3 hours of sleep per night.

Tony glares at the sleeping bundle below him. He understands insomnia, he really does. But the kid should have come to him instead of pretending that everything was fine—instead of lying to him.

Worried and angry, Tony calls Cap to fill his place and takes Peter home.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the final chapter is up! This was both hard and fun to write. Drop a comment cause I live for those. Constructive criticism is appreciated (so is mindless flattery, just fyi).
> 
> To clarify, Tony brings a sleeping Peter to the Starks’ house after the events at the end of the last chapter. Peter wakes up alone after a few hours, talks to Karen and realises Tony knows what’s going on, and reacts by trying to escape out of the window. 
> 
> The second part of this chapter occurs only a few minutes after the first one, while the third part takes place a few days later.

“I can’t believe you sold me out like that, Karen,” Peter says, his voice high and indignant as he scuttles down the wall of the Starks’ house and leaps to the ground.

“Sorry, Peter. I was very worried about you.”

“You don’t sound sorry at all,” he grumbles, softening anyway. “All right, map the way— Oh, shit.” He skids to a halt so fast he stumbles a little, and the reason for his colorful interjection is forced to catch him and set him upright.

“Language, Spiderman.” Tony is planted in front of him, giving off a distinctly unpleasant _I mean business_ vibe that makes Peter’s knees go a little weak.

Peter slips off his mask and holds up his hands as if trying to placate a wild animal. He isn’t sure if that would be more or less scary, come to think about it. He decides to to go with less—at least then he’d be able to supersuit his way out of the situation. And _I saved hundreds of people from a rampaging rhinoceros_ is an infinitely better story to tell Ned than _I got chewed out by Mr Stark, again_. “I can explain.”

Tony tilts his head to the side, just a little.

“Okay, maybe I can’t.” Peter is definitely beginning to sweat now. “I didn’t really—I don’t really want to talk to you about the in—the not sleeping thing,” he gets out. It would be awkward, Tony would feel stifled, and he would dismantle this careful peace between them. Peter’s got it all worked out. “Or the breaking my curfew thing. I’ll sort that out with Aunt May, I promise, you can—you can ask her if you want.”

Tony watches him, his face impassive, and Peter wonders if this silence is a tactic to intimidate him into spilling everything. He can feel it working.

“Um, can I—“ He tries to edge around Tony.

“No,” Tony replies with finality, and Peter stills in spite of himself. There is a strained moment where they both wonder whether Peter will leave anyway. Peter clears his throat and glances at Tony, fidgeting with his mask as he does.

Tony is wearing an AC/DC shirt under his suit jacket. Peter holds a vague, appalling memory of falling asleep with his head cushioned on the stiff material of that jacket, _Safe in New York City_ playing over the car speakers, a faint scent of aftershave in the air, and a hand tight on his arm, keeping him secure when the car bumped over potholes.

Tony has this authority over him that is more than suits and childhood idols, so Peter crumples the mask up with vicious force and goes back into the house.

 

 

Tony closes the workshop door and cuts to the chase: “Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t sleeping?”

“Figured you had enough to worry about,” Peter tells the floor.

He hears an impatient movement and then Tony’s hand finds his jaw and lifts his face, trying to get him to make eye contact. Childishly, Peter resists, his gaze skittering away from Tony’s and locking on the door behind him.

Tony isn’t having it. “Kid, look at me.”

After a beat, Peter obeys. Tony’s eyes are hard. “When something’s wrong with you, I want to hear about it.”

Tony doesn’t talk like that.

“But I don’t want to tell you,” Peter mutters. _Childish, childish, so childish._

He pinpoints a flash of something unidentifiable in his mentor’s eyes before he releases him. Peter can almost hear him bite back _Too bad, you’re going to anyway or else_ when he says, “Why not?”

Peter toys absent-mindedly with the bottom of Tony’s jacket. It’s a nervous habit. He thinks he used to do it with his dad, long ago. “I dunno,” he says to Tony’s chest.

Tony’s hand settles on top of his head and rakes through his hair. “Do you know why you can’t sleep?” His voice is as brusque as always, at odds with how gentle his callused fingers are as they work through a knot at the back of Peter’s head.

“My— well, my spidey-sense, it’s been going off all the time,” Peter croaks out. It’s easier to talk when Tony isn’t forcing eye contact. He has an embarrassingly firm grip on Tony’s jacket now.

“Is it going off now?”

An easy lie hovers on the tip of Peter’s tongue. “No.”

“But you just said—“

Peter lets go of the jacket and backs off a little. “It doesn’t go off around you, okay? Just you.” His voice is sharper than it needs to be.

“What, not even Steve?”

Peter groans, the sudden tension breaking. “Not the time, Mr Stark.”

“Right.” Tony gives him a smile that’s more warm than it is awkward. A little bit like the smile he gives Morgan. Peter notices a purple juice-pop stain on the outer corner of his mouth. “I make you feel safe,” he states.

“Yeah. That.”

“That makes me worry for your self-preservation instincts,” Tony says. “But oh, wait, it’s you. You don’t have any.”

“How are you turning this into a lecture?”

“It’s a dad power.”

“You’ve been doing that since way before Morgan,” Peter protests.

Tony slides his hands into his pockets. “A friendly neighborhood father figure power then.”

“You’re not _neighborhood_ ,” Peter says. He doesn’t refute the father figure part, and he knows that Tony knows that’s on purpose.

“You’re right,” Tony says. “I did save the entire universe.”

Peter’s throat tightens. “You almost died doing it.” The back-and-forth comes to a halt. He knows now, like he should have known before, that he can talk to Tony. He may not be good with emotional talk but he tries, for some people. “You almost died and your arm is gone, Mr Stark. I mean, that’s your arm. And I can’t sleep unless you’re with me, and it’s not like I can sleep here forever.”

“You died too, you know,” Tony says after a pause and it’s a terrible, incomplete answer but Peter knows what he means so he nods. “Did it hurt?”

“I don’t remember,” he admits.

“Good.” Another pause. “We’ll figure it out, kid,” Tony promises, and that’s all Peter needed to hear.

“But if you keep something like this from me again, I will metaphorically kick your ass—“ His gaze skips to the door, on the look-out for Morgan “—so hard it’ll go down in the history of ass-kicking.”

Maybe he needed to hear that too.

 

 

Morgan’s tea-party is held next to the lake. Peter shows up expecting the Starks, Happy, maybe some teddy bears and a quiet afternoon. Of course, it’s a party thrown by Tony Stark’s daughter so he really should have known better.

All the resident superheroes are present, mingling with a host of kids Morgan’s age. There are pink and white fireworks, a three-tier cake and a short speech from Pepper to the kids to commemorate the ‘CEO’ part of the theme, which goes: “Rule the world, kids! Especially you, girls!” Natasha raises her teacup in tribute, and nudges Nick Fury, who’s scaring the kids by gazing piercingly at all of them in turn.

“They’re too young to be SHIELD agents,” she says sternly.

“It’s never too early to start training the next generation, Agent Romanoff.”

Pepper tells Tony in an aside they’re not inviting Fury next time. Tony says he didn’t even invite Fury this time.

Peter spots Clint wearing a tiara halfway through and turns around to share a laugh with Tony, only to be confronted with the sight of Tony wearing one too. His is glittery. Peter takes out his phone.

“This is so going viral,” he whispers to Wanda, who’s the only Avenger who knows about his Twitter account. He prefers to keep it that way.

Tony hacks into his phone from his seat and deletes the picture before he can do anything about it, but it’s a nice party either way. And true to his word, Tony is helping Peter figure it out: a SHIELD therapist who knows everything about his situation, anti-anxiety meds specially curated for his spidey-sense, and, in the meantime, frequent sleepovers at the Starks’ place.

Morgan insists on taking the top bunk but you can’t have everything perfect.


End file.
